Serious question: don’t the artists have the ability to remove their music from Spotify if the deal is so bad?

yes, and more than a few prominent ones have such as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Xiu Xiu, but for most artists it requires negotiation with your label (annoying, not ideal, you don’t have much leverage) and the willingness to take a potentially permanent revenue and recognition hit (Spotify has an estimated 700 million users) in an already difficult business

this is going over hilariously on social media, despite the insistence by the Grammy’s that it has nothing to do with Beyonce’s win last year:

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told Billboard that the proposal for the two new categories was submitted previously several times before it passed this year. The new categories “[make] country parallel with what’s happening in other genres,” he explained, pointing to the other genres which separate traditional and contemporary. “But it is also creating space for where this genre is going.”

Traditional country now focuses on “the more traditional sound structures of the country genre, including rhythm and singing style, lyrical content, as well as traditional country instrumentation such as acoustic guitar, steel guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, piano, electric guitar, and live drums,” the 68th Grammys rulebook explains.

• Kazumi Watanabe ‎– To Chi Ka
• Sahib Shihab ‎– Sentiments
• Dr. Lonnie Smith - Boogaloo to Beck: A Tribute
• Takeo Moriyama - Smile
• Sevil - Sevil
• Collage - Kadriko

stuff that is basically jazz, even though it isn’t actually:

• Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe - Ikengas in London

aside: Hearing Things is very cool, and you should subscribe to them. they’re a genuine worker-cooperative, as far as i know

almost certainly yeah

i do suspect the publications with a niche like Pitchfork are basically goners without a change–actual newspapers can at least pretend to limp along in a severely gutted fashion for years (because large swathes of the industry are doing that right now, especially smaller papers acquired by hedge funds) but you can’t… really do that with a publication that prides itself on having contrarian views and an independent tone of voice. something like Pitchfork completely rides or dies by the quality of its writers. G/O Media gutting its unique voices are why i don’t read Deadspin despite having religiously done so when it was under the first iteration of Gawker, and why i support Defector now.

i’d argue the issue is less with music and more with journalism–although Pitchfork is probably in a worse situation than the typical journalistic outlet–because we’re a month into 2024 and layoffs have badly decimated Sports Illustrated, the LA Times, TIME, and a bunch of other publications. and outside of the separately unionized websites (of which Pitchfork is one) Conde Nast’s website portfolio just went on a one-day strike to protest the cuts they’re proposing (5%) to the workforce.

youtube is, and remains, my go-to for most music. i’ve never felt a need for spotify, i’m not in apple’s ecosystem, and unsurprisingly, you can still find pretty much anybody and anything on youtube–i have no shortage of stuff in my playlists with less than a thousand views, and some with even fewer views than that.

good example just scanning my list of music: Piry Reis - Limites. 439 views as of now, a not insubstantial number of which are because i’ve spread this particular song around!